The three young trainers
continue to make their way through the Safari Zone. After
Satoshi-tachi hear the rules of the preserve, they
notice a picture of a Miniryuu on the wall. The Safari Zone's
warden, Kaiser,
denies rumors that the pokemon is there. Satoshi
is not satisfied with this answer, so he calls Orchid-Hakase and learns
that rumors of the pokemon's presence caused a feverish
migration
of trainers to the preserve thirty years earlier. However, no one
was ever able to find the
pokemon. Later, the young trainers enter the Safari Zone and
begin catching pokemon while, unknown to them, the
Rocket-Dan go to the office and interrogate Kaiser. Kaiser is
coerced into telling them that Miniryuu is in the
Dragon Valley, so the Rocket trio heads to the lake there to blast fish
the
pokemon out. Kaiser is able to escape and enlists Satoshi and his
friends to help him thwart the trio's plans. Satoshi
dives into the
lake to retrieve the bomb, but he is unable to make it to the surface
before he runs out of air. All seems lost until Satoshi suddenly
emerges, riding on
the back of a Hakuryuu! After the young trainer returns the bomb
to the
Rocket-Dan, Kaiser takes a close look at the Hakuryuu and figures out
that it is the same Miniryuu he had befriended thirty years
before. After the reunion concludes, Satoshi sends the pokemon he
had
caught at the Safari Zone - a huge herd of Kentaros - to Orchid-Hakase
and then resumes his journey.

Thoughts

I’m going to ignore the elephant in
the room and focus on the actual episode for a moment.

Overall, I thought this was a
rather average episode. I think the way the show portrayed
the Safari Zone was pretty interesting, and including that whole part
about it being overrun with opportunistic trainers was a really nice
touch. Yeah, it kind of forces yet
another environmental message down our throats, but for some
reason it doesn't seem as in-your-face this time around. I also
think the show found a great
balance between keeping the Safari
Zone true to its video game routes and making it work for the
comparatively more realistic TV series.Satoshi
still has to use Safari Balls and he still gets thirty of them, but
there doesn't seem to be any time limit and he doesn't have to go
around throwing rocks at pokemon and praying they don't run away.Also, the TV
show doesn't have that effing annoying evolution music playing on an
endless loop.

Though I have to say, the fact that
Satoshi was able to catch 30 Kentaros – which means he had a 100%
capture rate – annoys me to no end.I’m lucky if I
can catch half that many in the actual games.

There are a number of things that
bug me about this one, though. Why
doesn't Kaiser take down the photo of Miniryuu he has hanging in plain
sight if Hess so worried about people finding out about its existence?Why didn't Satoshi and his friends question the fact that
the Rocket-Dan didn't follow them into the Safari Zone during their
“fair duel?”How did the Rocket-Dan overpower the
well-armed warden?How come the people who want to
go after Miniryuu didn't think to look in the Ryuuno Tani ("Dragon Valley")?How did Kaiser escape? Why didn't Kasumi call out
her Starmie to
help Satoshi out of the lake (or at least send her Hitodeman back into
the water once Kaiser was safe) instead of just standing there?
Or, alternatively, why didn't Satoshi use his Zenigame?

The rumors that 4Kids actually did
dub this episode is almost as old as the episode itself, but there's
absolutely no evidence that this is true.None of
the people who claim that the episode was dubbed can provide a source
for this claim, and at least one of the voice actors has denied
that they ever worked on the episode.People want
the rumor to be true because they enjoy the English
version and want to see every single episode in their native language,
but I think too many of them are letting their desires prevent them
from
seeing past the bullshit.

The omission of this episode caused
confusion for many dub-only fans since, all of a sudden, Satoshi has 30
Kentaros. I personally don't think it's as bad as, say, Brock's mom becoming a zombie,
but
it's still an unfortunate loss.

Despite the fact that the episode
was cut, we know that 4Kids at least got the footage of the episode
because they were able to use several of its scenes for the
Pokérap:

The scene where Kasumi,
Takeshi,
and Satoshi scream at the Gyarados Kasumi just caught with her lure is
also from this one, though I can't find it in the version of of the Pokérap
present on the DVDs.

Why
the episode was banned

While
neither 4Kids nor anyone else involved with
the franchise has ever come out and stated why this episode was never
dubbed, we pretty much know that Kaiser's guns are to blame.
People claim that this episode being banned doesn't make any sense
because we have seen guns in
this series before. Ash got threatened by a bunch of guns in "Here
Comes The Squirtle Squad," even going so far as to identify
them as "guns." Officer Jenny pointed a gun at our heroes just
one episode prior, in "The Kangaskhan Kid."
We'll see a burglar with a gun in "The Case of
the K-9 Caper," and Ash will imagine his friends getting shot
by an unknown sniper at the beginning of "Pokémon
Paparazzi!"

But you have to remember two things. The first is that the
censors absolutely make distinctions between things that you and I
wouldn't think twice about. There's a difference between
actually firing a gun and simply pointing it at someone. A gun being held up close to
someone and a gun being pointed at someone from far away are two
different things, in the eyes of the censors. A gun being
on-screen for ten seconds might be OK, but fifteen seconds of
screentime is taboo. It's not uncommon to see rifles and bazookas
allowed, but not handguns.
The difference between the guns in this episode and the guns in other
episodes is that in this episode, the guns were actually fired.
In this
episode, the guns were held right up to people's heads. In this
episode, the guns were onscreen longer than all those other instances
combined. In this episode, there were no other adults around to
stop the would-be shooter(s). In this episode, the guns in
question were the same type
of handguns a kid can find in his dad's sock drawer.

The second thing to remember is that TV censors are fickle and can
change their policies at the drop of a hat. This show's a perfect
example. Lorelei ("Prima") was allowed to
strut around with her cleavage all over the place in Season Two yet
Caroline's cleavage got edited out
in Season Eight. James got to have a pipe in Season One, but
Wobbuffet's pipe got erased in
Season Seven. Characters got to call themselves "wine connoisseurs" in Season One, then had to
drink milky stuff in Season
Eight, and are now able to drink wine again. It's not uncommon
for a show to be OK with something in one episode, suddenly have a
problem with
it in another, and then start allowing it again. Just because
something's allowed in one episode doesn't mean that it will be allowed
in every episode that follows.

Another issue the censors may have had with this episode is the fact
that there are no other adults around to protect Satoshi and his
friends. In three of the four other episodes to feature guns, a
Junsa came and saved the kids in two of those and stopped herself from
firing in one of them. And the fourth one existed only in
Satoshi's imagination. In this episode, however, there's no one
around to stop Kaiser. He could have killed all three of them and
no one would have known, and it's possible that the censors viewed
that as being unacceptable.

It also doesn't help that Satoshi and his friends are terrible role
models throughout the episode. A man pulls a gun on them, so they
follow him into his office.
And then later, when they're talking to Orchid-Hakase, they don't so
much as bring up the fact that their lives were being threatened by a
gun-toting sociopath. While those things alone wouldn't have been
enough to get the episode banned, they certainly wouldn't have helped.

People who are upset about the
omission of this
episode should note that this kind of thing is normal for kids'
cartoons.I could sit here and list dozens
and dozens of series that had some sort of ridiculous gun
censorship going on, and I
could sit here and tell you how shows
like Trigun and Cowboy Bebop were kept off Toonami
(a similar kids' block with much less restrictive censors)
because of all the gun use.

It's not just Pokémon, folks. We're
not the only ones being affected by the censors’ phobia of firearms.Couldn't
it have been censored just like any other episode?So you may be
wondering why 4Kids didn't just censor the guns out. Problem
solved, right?

Easier said than done, unfortunately.

The guns and their bullets are onscreen for about a minute and a half
(1:25) in this episode. That may not seem like a lot to you, but
that would bring a twenty-two minute episode down to a little over
twenty minutes, which is way shorter than they'd probably be allowed to
have. Networks are very strict about show length, and while an
episode with a few seconds cut here and there might be allowed, an
episode with that much
missing would not.

But let's just say, for the sake of argument, that the show being too
short wouldn't have been an issue. What edits would have had to
take place, based on what we know?

The first scene to feature a firearm takes place just outside the
warden's office. 4Kids would
have had to cut the part where Kaiser takes out his gun and points it
at the camera as well as the following shot of the gang reacting.
Because if you
don't cut out that reaction shot, the audience is going to wonder why
Ash and his friends are reacting so strongly for no reason.

The scenes with the guns inside the warden's office would probably have
had to end up on the cutting room floor, too. They could all be
removed without any
problem except for the last one, where he walks off camera and leaves
the office. You need the scene because it shows Kaiser exiting
the office, but he's clutching his holstered gun
the whole time. 4Kids would have to completely redraw his arm,
but even then you have the fact that the kids are all reacting in that
shot. What do you do with them?

The scene where the Rocket-Dan's being shot at could have been removed
and replaced
with a motto from a different episode. "The
Kangaskhan Kid" premiered in the U.S. on October 22nd, 1998
(Thursday), so this episode, had it been dubbed, would have aired the
following day. By that point in time, Japan had just aired "The
Legend
of the Surfing Pikachu" ("The Pi-Kahuna"). So 4Kids, in theory,
could have grabbed the footage of a motto from any episode up until
then - presumably one with a generic background - and inserted it into
this episode instead. Then, they would return to this episode with the footage of
the trio jumping off the giant sign they were on. The series
recycles motto footage all the time, so it wouldn't have looked out of
place here.

The scenes toward the second half of the episode, where Musashi and
Kojirou have Kaiser at gunpoint, would have been the most difficult
ones to
edit. You could cut them out in a way that would have Jessie
subduing the old man with her Arbok right from the get-go, but you'd
have to cut out a lot of footage / rearrange things to get to that
point. Another option would be to paint out the guns, but that'd
be a very difficult and time consuming thing to do. We're not
talking about erasing text on a static background here; we're talking
about props in two of the characters' hands that are constantly moving
about. And since this episode was animated in the traditional
way, the edits would look awful because of all the bouncing digital
paint.

Like I said before,
when all is said and done, there would be
approximately a minute and a
half (1:25 by my count) of scenes that would have to be cut or altered.
In addition to all of that,
the Safari
Zone sign at the entrance would get digital paint
because it's written in that evil language known as "Japanese."

So while it probably is possible for 4Kids to have
edited this episode, they obviously felt, for one reason or another,
that it wasn't worth the large amounts of time and money that would
have been required to make it work. To be fair, the episode does end with a really convenient
"let's not tell anyone about what we saw here today" line that pretty
much guarantees that the events of this episode will never be mentioned
again, so I guess 4Kids thought it wouldn't hurt to see it go.
Especially since they don't seem to realize
how captured pokemon tend to show up in future episodes.

Is a home release likely?

The short answer is, of course, no.

I see that a lot of people, online,
seem to believe that all Viz or TPCI would have to do is release this
episode on a DVD and slap a warning label on it.Y’know,
something that would let parents know that the contents on that
particular disc may not be suitable for younger kids or that these are
episodes that weren't aired on TV.The general
consensus seems to be that a TV rating (say, TV-PG) on the case, in big
letters, would
be enough.

The problem with that is the fact
that the Pokémon brand is a very important one.Nintendo
and the various companies involved with the franchise have worked
extremely hard to make sure that people associate the word
"Pokémon" with phrases like “family friendly” and “inoffensive.”When a parent buys a Pokémon DVD, they assume
that it's going to be something that doesn't contain any material
that's inappropriate for their little ones. And why shouldn't
they?

Releasing even one DVD with
material "too hot for TV" would risk compromising that. Parents
aren't
any less irrational today than they were when this episode would have
first come out, and I don't think it's hard to imagine the news
articles that would be posted about how "this new DVD shows off
Pok-E-man'z dark side."

Stuff like the manga is allowed to get away with more because it's less
mainstream than the TV series. When people think of "Pokémon," they think of the
cartoon or the video games, not the graphic novels that many bookstores
don't even stock.

There's also the fact that neither Viz nor TPCI really have any
incentive to spend the time and money necessary to dub this. It
wouldn't be purchased by Cartoon Network or anyone else as part of any
season package, so it would have to be bought as if it was a TV special
or something. And why would anyone do that? The animation
looks outdated, it doesn't advertise any current games, and the average
ten year old isn't going to understand what it is or why it's being
shown. Kids want to watch the new stuff; they're not anywhere
near as concerned about the past as we older fans.

Dubbing an episode isn't a small matter, either. Replacing the
Japanese track with an English track can cost more than $10,000
per episode, and that's if
they decide to go the uncut route. They'd have to pay for the
translation, ADR directors and script writers who would work together
to create a script that matches the lip flaps, the use of the recording
booth, bringing in the TPCI voice actors (that's who they'd be using,
by the way; Veronica Taylor and co wouldn't be brought back for this),
sound mixing, digital paint (they're not going the leave the title
screen in Japanese), music (do they need to buy the rights to that "Pokémon Theme" again? Or will they make a
new one?) and legal affairs. There's also stuff like distribution
costs, advertising, and DVD authoring to take into consideration.

I really think fans overestimate
how much a "lost episodes" DVD would sell. Pokémon DVDs, in general, seem
to sell enough to keep supporting themselves but don't really break any
type of sales record. If a "lost episodes" DVD was released, it'd have to be
advertised quite aggressively (or, advertised period) to keep it from being
ignored like all the other DVDs. There's no way in hell Viz or
TPCI or Nintendo or anyone else is going to do that.

Final Thoughts

Yes, it sucks when an episode of
any TV series gets banned for whatever reason. And with this
series in particular, we have "so close yet so far" thing going, as far
as having everything dubbed, that it can be particularly maddening.

If it's any consolation, though,
this
episode is one of the most easy to find episodes online.It's been fansubbed by a bunch of different groups
over the years, so tracking down a version with a translation in your
language is as easy as a simple Google search.